Nigel Farndale reviews this week's TV highlights: the season finale of
Homeland, and the first in a new series of Matt LeBlanc's British sitcom,
Episodes

Before the final episode of Homeland (Channel 4, Sunday) was aired, word spread that there was to be a second series. This was both a good and a bad thing. Good because Homeland has been, well, by most standards, good. Bad because it rather spoiled the climax. The next series would have to feature Brody in it, so clearly he wasn’t going to blow himself up at the end of this one.

My apologies if you haven’t been watching this psychological thriller and you don’t know who Brody is. But given that even Barack Obama has been glued, and he has the world to run, I’m guessing you will at least have heard about it. Brody (played by Old Etonian, Steve McQueen-lookalittlelike Damian Lewis) was a Marine who had been captured in Iraq and, for most of the series, kept viewers guessing about whether or not he’d really been turned by al-Qaeda. Carrie, a CIA agent played by Claire Danes, was convinced he had been, but then, and this was the interesting part, she was bipolar.

Like all great water cooler television, everyone seems to have had an opinion about why this drama worked. Here is mine. The main characters were not only each other’s opposites; they were in perfect balance with one another. I suspect Carrie was supposed to be the embodiment of the ideas R D Laing set out in his seminal book The Divided Self, namely that insanity is a healthy response to an unhealthy society. Her colleague Saul was sanity personified. He was the still, calm centre of the drama, the common consent. To use Laing’s terms, Saul was the conjunction to Carrie’s disjunction… but in the end he was wrong and Carrie, whom no one believed, was right. Her self was further divided by the double life she was leading: she wouldn’t let anyone know she was bipolar. And who else was living a double life? Brody, pretending he hadn’t converted to Islam. Balance, see.

The ending, in which Carrie decided to cure herself with a course of electrotherapy that would strip her temporarily of her memory, was both ingenious and frustrating — exactly what the ending of a thriller should be.

On the minus side it seemed a cliché to have the CIA boss always getting in the way and making the wrong judgement calls. Also I wasn’t entirely convinced by Brody’s loss of nerve after being talked down by his daughter. It had a slight Bobby Ewing waking up from a dream feel to it. But perhaps good drama needs a few loose ends like these left untied. It seemed satisfying, for example, that it was never explained why Saul failed the polygraph.

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In an age when the internet has changed people’s viewing habits dramatically, and by people I generally mean younger people who like to watch TV on their laptops at odd hours, Homeland represented a return to old-fashioned, terrestrial, Sunday night television viewing. It became a weekly event. So much so that it would have seemed wrong to watch it at any time other than 9.00pm, in front of the fire. You had to wait for it. Do it at the proper time.

I’m slightly annoyed with myself for feeling proud that the star of this American hit is British. I feel similarly pathetic for thinking how nice it is that Matt LeBlanc has deigned to star in the British sitcom Episodes (BBC Two, Friday). I suppose he’s not exactly slumming it, giving that it is a big-budget, joint British and American production, written by David Crane, the co-creator of Friends. And the first series won LeBlanc a Golden Globe. But still.

LeBlanc plays an insensitive, sexually rampant, self-absorbed version of himself, who comes between a British husband and wife (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) by sleeping with the wife. It’s play-within-a-play stuff, or rather sitcom-within-a-sitcom, a bit like Extras. It also represents something of a mini-genre in which stars play versions of themselves, such as Larry David in the glorious Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The first episode of this second series of Episodes got off to a slightly wobbly start with a gratuitous scene in which LeBlanc was given hand relief by a blind woman in a screening room. Sub-American Pie that, I thought. But it had its moments. I even laughed out loud at one point when LeBlanc began smiling during a telling off from his former mate Mangan. “I miss this,” he said… Perhaps you had to be there. My favourite line though was this from a TV executive: “No one cares about TV reviews. They hate most of the crap we’ve got on the air and people still watch it.”